Almost every presentation on organisational change includes the claim that around 70% of change programmes fail. It appears in books, consultancy reports and board papers. It is rarely footnoted.
In 2011, Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton set out to find the evidence behind it. His paper, "Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?", published in the Journal of Change Management, reviewed five published sources that report the figure. His conclusion was that there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support it.
Where the number seems to come from
The earliest traceable version is in Michael Hammer and James Champy's 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation. They gave what they called an unscientific estimate that 50 to 70% of reengineering efforts did not achieve the results intended. That was a guess, and it was about one kind of programme, not change in general.
The version most people quote comes from a 2000 Harvard Business Review article by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria, which opened by stating that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. It gave no source. Later reports by other authors, including consultancies, repeated the figure and cited each other or these earlier pieces.
Why it matters
A made-up base rate is not harmless. If leaders believe most programmes fail whatever they do, a programme that is going badly looks normal, and the warning signs get explained away. It also makes it easy to sell "change management" as a general cure, without asking what specifically is going wrong.
"Failure" is also too loose a word to be useful. A programme can deliver late but still deliver. It can hit its cost target and miss its revenue target. It can succeed in one division and stall in another. A single percentage hides all of that.
Better questions to ask about your own programme
- What exactly was this programme meant to change, and how will we know? Write down the measures, their baseline and who owns each one.
- Are the benefits tracked separately from the activity? Milestones met are not the same as value delivered.
- Who has to behave differently for this to work, and has anything changed in how they are measured or rewarded?
- Which decisions are waiting, and who is waiting for them? Programmes often slow down because a decision has no clear owner.
- If we stopped today, what would we keep? This shows which parts are working.
There is a real body of research on why change succeeds or struggles. It is more varied, and more useful, than a single number. Hughes's paper is a good place to start, partly because it shows how easily a figure becomes a fact through repetition.
Sources
- Hughes, M. (2011), "Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?", Journal of Change Management, 11(4), 451–464 (University of Brighton research portal)
- StrategyU, "Do 70% of change initiatives really fail?" (summary of the sources Hughes reviewed)
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Published by Midvale Consulting. Views are general in nature and are not advice for any specific situation.
